Zawaya

Maghreb families adapt new technologies to Ramadan

By: Iqbal Al Gharbi

Ramadan is the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, and the month of divine revelation. Every year during this period, Muslims observe a purifying fast. Believers who observe the fast during Ramadan wait for sunset to eat and celebrate the revelation of the Qur’an. The month of Ramadan is thus a period of fasting and feasting.

Therefore, Ramadan is an exceptional moment of collective consciousness, a moment of exaltation and ecstasy during which the Maghreb community vibrates in unison, and becomes conscious of its unity. On this occasion, the members of the Maghreb community communicate in the same time and at the same time.

In fact, Ramadan reactivates collective memory and reinforces identity values.

Since the information revolution, the emergence of new communication technologies and the access to satellite television maintain, renovate, and extend the moments of social sociability and Ramadanian conviviality.

On the one hand, the massive access to foreign channels – with almost 60% of Maghreb households having receivers and satellite dishes, and a peak of 79% to 80% for countries such as Algeria or Tunisia – allows an anchorage in an imagined and imaginary Muslim community, which extends from the “gulf to the ocean”. This helps to revive local traditions with an anchorage in an “internationalized” Islam. Muslim viewers, who have access to more than 1500 TV channels including nearly 250 ones in Arabic, feel that despite the immense Muslim geopolitical space and cultural diversity of heterogeneous areas without communication between them sometimes, there remains an invariant theological core that concerns them all.

On the other hand, Maghreb people delineate their cathodic choices during this period according to a new scale of values generated by Ramadan’s context. This is how national channels capture the attention of an audience that, under normal circumstances, deserts them all as well as their clones.

Moreover, television turns into a new time reference that is attached to the old rituals and ancient family practices. In most Maghreb homes, Ramadan time is divided into three strong moments:
- The call of the Muezzin who announces the end of the fast
- Religious programs that fill the need for spirituality during this sacred period
- TV soap operas, or “musalsalat”, that bring family members together and raise discussions, comments and anecdotes.

As a result, new information technologies seem to be original opportunities for sociability, where modernity is intertwined with tradition. During the month of Ramadan, Maghreb peoples manipulate these technologies by converting them into new sources of identities, structures and new or modified standards.